Arresting officer Ken Lam wonders: ‘Did I make the right decision?’

The decision to make a psychological support team available to police officers on site in the aftermath of Monday’s van rampage is being lauded by a psychologist specializing in first-responder mental health.

“It’s a good sign that they’re being proactive, that they’re not waiting,” said Dr. Jeff Morley, a former RCMP officer who works as a psychologist helping police officers, soldiers and other emergency personnel process traumatic incidents.

“It validates that these scenes are horrific, not only for the officers, but for fire, ambulance, for the civilians and witnesses of these atrocities,” Morley said.

Toronto police Deputy Chief Peter Yuen told reporters at a press conference Wednesday that mental health staff were quickly made available to front-line officers, who were coming off a shift that saw scenes unprecedented in Toronto.

Among the cops who received psychological support is Toronto police Const. Ken Lam. He is the officer who apprehended Alek Minassian after he is alleged to have deliberately struck pedestrians on a busy stretch of Yonge St. on Monday, killing 10 and injuring 14.

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Lam, 42, who joined the Toronto police in 2011, has been praised for his calm takedown of Minassian. He was working as a traffic response officer Monday and was not assigned to Yonge and Finch but ran in to help when the call went out, Yuen says.

Worldwide attention has been drawn to Lam since the arrest, but the officer hopes the focus will shift to other first responders on scene that day, said Yuen, who knows Lam well and spoke on his behalf. Yuen has called Lam regularly since Monday and says he is doing well. But the incident is weighing on his mind.

“Right now he’s still asking me, asking his colleagues: ‘Did I make the right decision? What if I opened fire that day, what would have happened?’ These are things that are still going through his head.”

The mental health support for police is“to ensure the officers know help is available,” Yuen said. “The debriefers are trained to observe certain behavioural signs, because some officers are very talkative — that might not be a good thing. Some officers are very quiet — that might not be a good thing.”

Some aspects of what’s called “critical incident debriefing” — including discussing what transpired during a traumatic event — are mandatory for officers, while other forms of treatment will be optional, Yuen said.

Const. Ken Lam has been praised around the world for his arrest of the man suspected of killing 10 people with a rental van on Yonge St. Monday. (Galit Rodan / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

“In today’s day and age, officers do take up that program,” he said.

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Morley said there’s no doubt an officer will be affected by a high-adrenaline, high-risk situation like Minassian’s arrest.

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But “we should not presume” that he is going to develop post-traumatic stress disorder from that, he said. “Most officers or soldiers or civilians that go through a traumatic event recover.”

That recovery is all the more likely when there are mental health supports in place. Morley said he hopes that, from now on, such support is simply part of the response to similar mass-casualty incidents — “part of a big investigation, just like we have operational needs and investigators.

“I hope it just becomes normal — it’s just part of how we do business,” he said.